It’s an exciting time for Dragon Quest fans. In the last few weeks, we’ve had the Minecraft ($6.99) take-off Dragon Quest Builders announced for Sony’s platforms, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 3 announced for the Nintendo 3DS, and a live stream scheduled for July 28th where it’s expected the long-awaited Dragon Quest 11 will be announced. Mobile isn’t being left out of the party, either. Amid all of these other announcements, Square Enix also said that they would be bringing a new free-to-play Dragon Quest game to mobile platforms later this year.
Titled Dragon Quest Of The Stars, it appears to be a social RPG where you explore star-shaped areas to power up your team. You’ll fight monsters, gather treasure, and so on. This isn’t the first foray into free-to-play for the Dragon Quest series, with the popular Dragon Quest Monsters mobile game still doing quite well for itself, but it does appear to have more of the traditional Dragon Quest elements in its design. On a more exciting level, the little snippets of the game that Square Enix has shown look to be using a 3D engine similar to that of Dragon Quest 7 3DS, perhaps giving us a clue as the future of the mobile port of that particular game. As for Dragon Quest Of The Stars, although there is little information at the moment, I think it’s safe to assume some things about it. The game will almost certainly require an internet connection. It very likely will have stamina meters, premium currency, and random gatcha pulls (probably for equipment). In all likelihood, it will never release outside of Japan.
But hey, the nice thing about free-to-play games is that you can go and download them from other regions without needing to track down a local iTunes card. If you want to see the first look at the game, you can hit the official website, but there’s not much to see as of yet. Whenever Dragon Quest Of The Stars releases in Japan, we’ll be sure to put together some import impressions. For now, whether you like free-to-play or not, I suppose we can at least be happy that mobile is not being left out of the extensive Dragon Quest happenings going on in the wind-up to the game’s 30th anniversary next year.
